


Prices Paid

by icewhisper



Series: The Truth Of It All [4]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Gen, Post-Ishval, but also at some vague point early in the show
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:35:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24074551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: Ed never thought that he and Mustang were anything alike. In the aftermath of a mission, while his automail arm hung uselessly by his side, he realized he was wrong.
Relationships: Edward Elric & Roy Mustang
Series: The Truth Of It All [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1695760
Comments: 22
Kudos: 147





	Prices Paid

“I told you to not go after them alone,” Mustang said behind him, tone so amused, it made Ed want to punch him. Not that he didn’t want to punch the bastard on a normal day, but now? Now, when he was sitting on the ground with his automail arm hanging uselessly beside him, he wanted to deal with his CO even less than he usually did.

“Shut up,” he snapped. “Where’s Al?”

“With Havoc and Fuery.  _ They _ follow orders.” Mustang moved around him, hands tucked easily into his pockets as he surveyed Ed. Hawkeye moved around him silently to deal with the rogue alchemist Ed had left unconscious at the treeline. Not that he couldn’t  _ see _ the smirk that she was only just letting slip past her usual impassive mask, but she, at least, wasn’t teasing him.

Some days, he wished Hawkeye was his CO instead. Hell, he might even take Hughes, but only if it came with earplugs and aspirin. Anyone but  _ Mustang _ and his dumb, cocky face.

Or… Fine. Not Armstrong either, he amended as the big man came through with a couple of his own team to assist Hawkeye. The unconscious alchemist got cuffed and tossed over Armstrong’s shoulder for the trek back. Nice guy, Ed thought, but a little...much, sometimes. The stragglers of his team, a little useless now that they realized they weren’t needed, looked towards Ed, but Mustang waved them off.

“Sir?” Hawkeye asked, a couple steps behind Armstrong’s team as they made their way up the path Ed had come from.

“We’ll meet you there,” he told her. “Fullmetal seems to be sparking.”

“I am not!” Ed cried, because his arm wasn’t  _ that _ bad off.

Mustang looked down at his leg.

God dammit. The bastard was right. He patted out the spark that was coming off his metal knee, annoyed.

Hawkeye shook her head at them both, but she pulled a small kit from her pocket and handed it over to Mustang. A repair kit, he realized absently, one of those miniature ones for patch jobs. They normally only held up long enough for someone to get their ass to a mechanic, but they were fine for quick, little tune-ups. Winry had been harping on him to carry one for years, but Al was the only one who actually listened to her.

Mustang took it with a nod. “Keep an eye on the rogues,” he told her, “and tell Al we’ll be along shortly.”

“Yes, sir.”

He turned his attention back to Ed when she left and popped the kit open. His gloves were dirty, he noticed, but it was to be expected. The whole place was a mess and Mustang was the idiot who thought white gloves were a good idea for combat.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Only one of us here has two functioning arms right now,” Mustang pointed out. He reached for Ed’s right arm and hummed softly at the way the joint followed limply. “Did no one ever teach you to be careful with these?”

Ed scowled. “Aw, shut up. What do you know about it?”

Mustang – bastard – chuckled at him and set his arm down so he could take off his gloves and…

Two metal hands shone in the light and neither of them were Ed’s.

He stared at them, wide-eyed, as they moved, unbuttoning the cuff of each sleeve so Mustang could neatly roll them up to his elbows. There wasn’t any skin, just shining metal and it shouldn’t have shocked him. He’d seen plenty of people with automail – saw his own goddamn limbs every day – but not on Mustang.

The design was sleeker than Ed’s own, fingers somehow more delicate than he thought could be done with machinery. Winry probably would have looked at them and downright  _ salivated _ .

“I thought you had a thing about germs,” he said before he could think to keep his mouth shut, “or that you were just a paranoid bastard.”

“Well, I am paranoid,” Mustang allowed, “but that’s not the only reason.”

“You’ve never taken your gloves off,” he pushed, “and people don’t talk about you having  _ those _ .” He waved at Mustang’s automail with the arm the colonel wasn’t working on.

“They don’t,” the bastard agreed and didn’t explain why the hell no one seemed to whisper about Mustang’s arms the way they did about dispatcher girl’s leg. There weren’t rumors floating around about how it happened.

“Was it Ishval?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking,” Mustang allowed after a long moment and released his arm again so he could gather three screws together.

He clapped and Ed’s blood went cold.

“You’ve done human transmutation,” he said numbly. It wasn’t possible. Mustang couldn’t have… He would have  _ known _ , wouldn’t he? Even if Mustang hadn’t told him – and, shit, Ed knew why people wouldn’t want to just  _ admit it _ – he should have been able to tell. The man’s alchemy… “That’s why you always wear the gloves.”

“You’re getting better at deduction,” Mustang said like an asshole. He compared the broken screw he’d removed with the one he’d made and went about screwing it into Ed’s shoulder.

“ _ Why _ ?” Had he lost someone? Had he been trying to save someone? Even bringing someone back from the brink of death skirted the line enough to probably get your ass tossed straight to the Gate.

“ I wanted to right my wrongs," he said simply, eyes focused on the shifting gears in front of him. "I failed and I paid for it, same as you."

Right his wrongs. He hadn’t said Ishval wasn’t  _ why _ he’d lost his arms, but that it hadn’t been what he thought. His chest went tight. “You tried to bring people back.”

“Ishvalans, yes.”

“When…”

“Four months after I got home. Try moving your shoulder.”

Ed did, surprised when it moved. It wasn’t  _ smooth _ by any means, but it was better than he’d had. Winry might yell at him a little less when he saw her. “How’d you cover it up?”

“I didn’t. Someone else did,” he said and, of course, didn’t explain who, because Mustang was still a paranoid bastard and of fucking  _ course _ he wasn't going to explain why someone would help him hide what he'd done. It wasn’t like when Ed had joined up. He’d been an unknown and people were easily waved off with a story about an accident when he was a kid, but people knew who Mustang was. There had to have been people asking how the Hero of Ishval lost his arms. “The common story is that there was an accident after the war. There were a lot of those afterward.”

“Other alchemists trying human transmutation?”

“Suicides,” Mustang corrected with an ease that made Ed sick. Like a bunch of soldiers offing themselves after a war was to be expected. Sometimes, he wondered what the hell he’d been thinking when he’d signed up – what  _ Mustang _ had been thinking when he suggested military service to an eleven-year-old. “I think that was what Hughes expected when he found me after.”

Ed’s back straightened. “Hughes?”

Mustang hummed. “Don’t ask him about it. He still panics if I get a nosebleed.”

He thought of the blood spilled across a basement floor, smears left as he dragged himself around and the  _ thing _ he and his brother had created. He didn’t imagine losing two arms was any less bloody than an arm and a leg. “I won’t,” he promised, voice soft. “Mustang?”

“Hm?”

"Your arms," he said quietly, "do you want them back?"

"No," Mustang replied without hesitation. “The people I killed… My arms were a small price to pay."

“Even if it didn’t work?” he asked, but Mustang only nodded and Ed sighed, silent while the man worked. It wasn’t fair, he thought, that Mustang could roll up his sleeves and suddenly seem more human than bastard. That it could make him respect him a little more. A shared mistake and he  _ knew _ how much Al tried to understand sensation – tried to cling to the memory – but no one understood the pain of it unless they’d felt it too.

For a moment, he wanted to tell Mustang the truth – that he didn’t care about getting his own body back, so long as  _ Al  _ did – but the words caught in his throat. It was too much. He couldn’t tell Mustang that when he hadn’t even told his brother.

Mustang fiddled with his wrist again and motioned for him to move it. This time, he managed it without the grating noise. “Can you move your leg at all?”

He could, but it sent a shock of pain up through his nerves. He cursed.

“Stop.” Mustang shifted, moving down to work at his knee where his pants had torn open. He frowned. “The wiring in there’s shot. That’s why it’s sparking.”

Ed groaned. If the circuitry was a goner, that meant Winry was going to have to make him a whole new leg. “Great. That mean I’m stuck with this until I get back to Resembool?”

Mustang kept staring at his leg. “No,” he said finally. “The range of motion probably won’t be great, but if I melt down the broken wiring, it should trigger the leg to lock up. You’ll limp, but it won’t hurt.”

“If you  _ melt it _ ?” he repeated, but of course Mustang’s solution would be fire. The man was a goddamn pyro.

“Would you rather deal with it as it is?”

He glared down at the way his knee kept sparking. “If you blow my leg off…”

Mustang didn’t signify that with a response and clapped, examining his left hand closely after the alchemical discharge faded. Ed leaned in, curious, and his eyes widened when he saw the roughness that had replaced smooth metal at the pads of his thumb and middle fingers. “Is that flint?”

Mustang nodded and straightened out Ed’s leg casually as if he hadn’t just gone and turned his fingers into a goddamn  _ striker _ . “Now, don’t move.”

Ed curled his hands into fists the second before Mustang snapped. It didn’t hurt – really, he didn’t feel it at all – but he watched his leg give the jerk as it locked into place. Moving around was going to be a  _ bitch _ . “Is that what you do, then?” he asked. “If you don’t have your gloves?”

“I still need something to ignite the flame,” Mustang explained, apparently satisfied that Ed’s leg wasn’t going to melt. “Unless I have a lighter to push it along, it’s no good otherwise.”

Ed clicked his tongue and let Mustang help him up, only because trying to get up on his own with his leg locked would have left him with even less dignity. “You could make it into a real weapon, you know. That way you’re not useless when it rains.”

Mustang gave him a withering look. “I don’t take advice from people who aren’t tall enough to ride the carousel.”

“Bastard, I’m tall enough for that!”

“Are you?” he hummed as he rolled his sleeves back down and reached for his gloves. Ed was going to punch him, repercussions be damned. “I’m sure you’ll tell your brother about this, but no one else, Fullmetal. The ones who need to know do and don’t especially like hearing it again.”

“I won’t,” he swore, almost offended Mustang thought he'd go blabbing. “You kept our secret. I can keep yours.”

Mustang inclined his head in thanks and they started walking. It went slower than Ed would have liked, but Mustang kept pace and didn’t try to baby him. That much, he could appreciate.

Still, he found his gaze drifting to Mustang’s arms every so often. In the years since he’d met him, he truly hadn’t seen the man without his gloves and Mustang had always been reluctant to touch him. He’d figured it was because of the rumors that went around after Ed had been recruited, but now, he wondered if it was Mustang simply trying to hide the tell-tale weight of an automail hand.

“Brother!” Al called, rushing over once they were in sight, but his eyes followed Mustang as he stepped away and handed the repair kit back to Hawkeye. She had to know, right? That had to be why she carried the kit with her. And Hughes knew. If Hughes knew, did that mean he was just playing dumb about him and Al?

His brother’s hand fell on his flesh shoulder and he looked up. “Hey.”

“Are you okay? You shouldn’t rush off like that!”

“Winry’s going to yell at me, but yeah, I'm fine,” he assured him and looked down at his right hand. “Just thinking.”

The End

**Author's Note:**

> And, with that, we've reached the end of this series. Originally, this exact fic was the entire point of the notes I'd written, but when I started writing, the three other fics just kind of...happened.
> 
> Also, I don't know why all the fics of this series had titles with P-words. It became a dumb trend when I realized the first and last fic had that in common and I, thus, decided to be a dork about it.
> 
> Take a look [HERE](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24505555/chapters/60291814) for an amazing art Roy & Mae's art that Lilituism drew! I'm in absolute awe.


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